Recently updated blogs

I support statutes that restrict businesses from contractually “gagging” their customers’ reviews. This pernicious business practice emerged around 15 years ago. Eventually, both state legislatures and Congress banned the practice. The flagship law in this area is the Consumer Review Fairness Act, enacted by Congress in 2016. My primer on that law. California enacted a similar law, Civil Code 1670.8, informally called the “Yelp Law” (as in, it protected consumers’ …

Online Album Club tonight. When the host announced it would be an Alanis Morissette record I braced myself for an ordeal, but Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie was an intriguing, surprising treat.

When you visit our exhibition, Medieval Women: In Their Own Words, the first item you’ll find on display isn’t a manuscript, a document or a printed book. It’s a statue. A crowned female figure in formal robes, weathered to a ruddy brown, her body damaged in places and missing a...

One of the most enduringly popular articles on this website (at least in terms of clicks and re-posts) is a very early one, from 2013. It concerns the graphic identities created for Railtrack’s major stations by Citigate Lloyd Northover. These ones… Firstly – have I really been writing this website on and off for that […]

It’s the season of thanks, and here in Massachusetts public transit, there is much to be thankful for. As someone who watches their TrainTrakr with remorse at how few trains have been on the move recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see a fully-lit board this morning. No more slow zones After two multi-day closures during October, the Orange Line fully reopened on November 2nd, free of speed restrictions for …

“Hume’s Trojan Horse,” my review of Aaron Alexander Zubia’s new book The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination, appears in the Fall 2024 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Oof. Regardless of your personal takes on Aethy, this closure — specifically, the reason for it — is one hell of a canary . . .

Wow, it has already been one year since I joined NerdPress. And I couldn’t possibly be happier that I did. The NerdPress team are such great people to work with. Everyone is very dedicated to their job, but they are also well balanced people who care about their work, their community, and their core values. They don’t just say so they actually do it. My thanks to Andrew Wilder and …

There's an under-appreciated connection between two of this week's big political stories - Starmer's promise to "crack down hard" on benefit fraud; and the assisted dying bill. The link is James C. Scott's concept (pdf) of legibility, which for my purposes we can understand to mean the degree to which the state can read, and thus control, society. A big question with the assisted dying bill is: are there sufficient …

‘One day, I was summoned to a pub near the Royal Court theatre where Samuel Beckett was looking at my work. “These are wonderful pictures,” he said’I knew Samuel Beckett’s reputation. He didn’t like photographers. He didn’t want them around really. It’s hard to believe I took so many photographs of him. During the 1970s, I photographed him and his rehearsals at the Royal Court theatre in London, and eventually …

Mon cher ami,Il ne faut pas s'enfermer dans sa propre terreur. life, you thought, as you were half asleep and making breakfast cake, which takes less than 5 minutes just fruit bit of flour, stick in oven go back to sleep wake up again nice breakfast, coffee and cake, yes good; and you had made a specific mixing bowl, heavy so it doesn't slide around much and high inward curved …

AWS (via Hacker News): Amazon S3 can now perform conditional writes that evaluate if an object is unmodified before updating it. This helps you coordinate simultaneous writes to the same object and prevents multiple concurrent writers from unintentionally overwriting the object without knowing the state of its content. You can use this capability by providing the ETag of an object using S3 PutObject or CompleteMultipartUpload API requests in both S3 …

Tirzah Garwood, untitled embroidery (woman watering)It's always gratifying to get some press for an exhibition, but the reviews of Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious have been particularly enjoyable. Writers seem to have enjoyed coming face to face with an artist they haven't really seen before, and to have been affected by Garwood's peculiar magic as I was and as visitors to the gallery seem to be. We're not making claims about …

Things are reasonably OK these days, but I thought I’d list a few work hacks that I’ve come to rely on over the years (and that are now a part of my daily routine). But there’s a couple of caveats. For instance, a lot of these work for me because I happen to use Microsoft 365 (neé Office) for my day to day work. In fact, I can do 95% …

It’s that time of year again: Indie App Sales is currently boasting over 400 Mac and iOs apps for sale. There are some real gems on the list.